The project I am currently working on makes use of the Netflix API to retrieve information about titles and displays the box art. It took me a while to get it working, mainly because I was trying to do too much. I figured I’d share this information, in case you also are going about using the API in the wrong way. There are two ways to use the API. First, you use it to make simple calls to their RESTful web services. Second, you are making a front-end of some sort that signs in as the user and lets them manipulate their queue, browse the library, or watch on demand streams. For our application I needed to go the first route, but was coding it the second way, which was overkill, and was causing me major problems. To perform a simple Title search, or to do a daily download of their entire index, you don’t need to sign in as a Netflix user, you just need to authenticate using Open Authentication with your consumer key and consumer secret (which you will need to apply for on their developer site).

Some kind developer was nice enough to write a simple class to help you with this. You can view the code to his implementation, OAuthBase, here. Add this class to your application, and then it’s as simple as the following code to perform a title search.


private void Search()
{
    var url = new Uri(“http://api.netflix.com/catalog/titles?term=” + titleName);

    var consumerKey = ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings[“ConsumerKey”];
    var consumerSecret = ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings[“ConsumerSecret”];

    string normalizedUrl;
    string normalizedRequestParameters;

    var oauth = new OauthBase();

    var signature = oauth.GenerateSignature(
        url, consumerKey, consumerSecret,
        null, null, “GET”, oauth.GenerateTimeStamp(), oauth.GenerateNonce(),
        out normalizedUrl, out normalizedRequestParameters);

    var finalUri = normalizedUrl + “?” + normalizedRequestParameters + “&oauth_signature=” +
        oauth.UrlEncode(signature);

    // Call the service to perform the title search
    var xmlDocument = new XmlDocument();
    xmlDocument.Load(finalUri);
}


Believe me, this is so much simpler than what I started out doing. I was following their examples and I was connecting to their site through my application, bringing up a Netflix login screen, having to add my application to a trusted application list, etc. I wasted a couple days development before I realized that was only needed if I wanted to let users interact with Netflix, not just do a title search.

Tags: development, .net